Press Release
THE DRIVE FOR SWEET SUCCESS AT FOX’S
Britain’s demand for one of its favourite biscuits seemingly
knows no bounds to the extent that the production line for Rocky
bars has recently been upgraded at Fox’s Biscuits’ Kirkham plant in
Lancashire. And, at the heart of the project, once again, are
Fox’s own favourites, precision variable speed drives from Control
Techniques.
One limiting factor to the line’s throughput speed was the
caramel depositing station and this is where Fox’s development team
focused their attention, bringing in depositing systems specialists
Wymbs Engineering of Macclesfield.
The solution, comprising a pressurised Wymbs multi-head
manifold, with 2-axis movement and fed by metered pump, has
increased the throughput on the line substantially. Three
variations of Rocky chocolate bars – Rocky Chocolate, Rocky Caramel
and Rocky Orange – as well as several ‘own-brand’ biscuits for
leading retail chains can all be produced on this one line.
As each row of Rocky Caramel biscuits passes along the conveyor
underneath the caramel depositing manifold, a measured amount of
caramel is laid along each biscuit. The manifold can be set
to any required trajectory in horizontal and vertical axes to suit
the product, the temperature and viscosity of the caramel (or other
filling), the ambient temperature and the dispensing pressure.
The precision control of the depositing manifold and the
metering pumps is the duty of four Control Techniques Unidrive SP
2.2kW AC drives operating in servo-mode and working in conjunction
with Control Techniques FM servo-motors with resolver feedback
.
Two control the manifold positioning, one the dispensing pump
into the manifold and the fourth a separate pump that dispenses
caramel into ‘tote’ bins for transfer to other production
plants.
Unidrive SP drives, each fitted with plug-in programmable
Application Modules, proved to be the ideal selection for this
task, making system programming quicker and easier according to
Wymbs Engineering’s systems engineering manager, Mark Walker.
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